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Thursday, March 23, 2017

`With Bigger Windows'

As
some readers get older, the attraction of minor writers grows on them. We know
the majors and return to some with undiminished pleasure, but do I really want
to read Kafka, Camus, Hemingway or Dostoevsky again? (All four have an
adolescent appeal. None is quite adult.) Minor writers, previously unknown or
unfairly ignored, are a gift to seasoned readers. And who’s to say they’re
minor? Melville once was minor. Who would give up on Max Beerbohm because he’s
not John Galsworthy?

I
first learned of Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) some years ago in the letters
of Henry James. He seemed somehow insubstantial, an impression reinforced by my
now-jettisoned prejudice that a writer had to produce a novel, preferably several,
to be taken seriously. An American who lived most of his life in England, Smith
seemed to know everybody, including Henry James, George Santayana and Bernard
Berenson, and I had the impression he was a dabbler, an annoying wannabe like
George Plimpton. Much later I read All
Trivia (1933), Smith’s compendium of four earlier collections of anecdotes,
aphorisms and one-liners, and was charmed. These are from the fourth, Last Words:

“The
old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.”

“When
elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at least
real conversation begins, and life is delicious.”

“What
with its crude awakenings can youth know of the rich returns of awareness to
elderly people from their afternoon naps; of their ironic thoughts and long
retrospections, and the sweetness they taste of not being dead?”

Now
I’m reading Reperusals and Re-Collections,
a gathering of essays Smith published in 1937, loosely unified by the theme of
rereading favorite writers. Among Smith’s reacquaintances are Jane Austen,
Proust, Jeremy Taylor, Walter Pater, Donne and Madame de Sévigné. In the first
essay, “Montaigne,” he writes:

“There
are readers and I am one of them whose reading is rather like a series of
intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life;
we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest
fashion; make it a Gospel,
which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the
world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.”

Long-time
serious readers will recognize the sentiment, a close analog of certain romantic
attachments. When young, I felt compelled to proselytize for my
“intoxications.” I’ve given that up as futile and often irritating. Today, I’m
likelier to mention the book or author, and then leave it to the readers. The
adventurous, driven ones are rare. Smith identifies the continuities in our
reading loyalties, increasingly precious as we grow older:

“There
is something reassuring, too (at least, I find it so), in these renewals of
former admirations. We all endeavour, as Spinoza says, to persist in our own
being; and that endeavour is, he adds, the very essence of our existence. When,
therefore, we find that what delighted us once can still delight us: that
though the objects of our admiration may be intermittent, yet they move in
fixed orbits, and their return is certain, these reappearances will suggest
that we have after all maintained something of our own integrity; that a sort
of system lies beneath the apparent variability of our interests; that there
is, so to speak, a continuity within ourselves, a core of meaning which has not
disintegrated with the years.”

Smith
suggests there is self-knowledge to be found in an examination of our reading
histories. A lovely speculation follows:

“And
if we find, when we read again one of our classics -- say Virgil for instance --
that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more
pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of
everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness
and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries
in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us,
therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever :
that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid
in the process ; that the observatory or palace it has edified for its
habitation, though always falling out of repair in places, one wing collapsing
after another, is yet being always rebuilt on a more consistent plan, and with
bigger windows.”

1 comment:

Some favorite sentences:p 128 The crudeness of my mind at the age of 20 wakens amazement in me. … I feel a kind of impatient pity for that half-baked young fool.149 Dupe of the Devil’s Sophisms, work for awhile, then have $ for leisure151 The bully of the warehouse … vilified a poor wretch, and was listened to by the other wretches with malignant joy and hope.219-226 Henry James, on "Loneliness", and the sublime doctrine of solitude.295 I prefer those who ... who have the power of sitting down morning after morning to a piece of scholarly work, done for the love of it and with no thought of immediate remuneration.